"Almost exactly one year ago today, IBM acquired the cloud company (SoftLayer) and ever since has become one of the front-runners in the data center world. Keep in mind, IBM was the ""dark horse"" in the data center and cloud race - when other companies like Amazon and Facebook were building huge citadels devoted to the storage of data - or using already built data centers like Fortrust or Equinix - IBM held back, and the move worked brilliantly.

IBM's Latest ""Watson"" Fueling the Newest Needs on SoftLayer's Cloud Platform And you may have noticed if you've been following the IBM's massive meteoric rise into the cloud with its billion-dollar datacenter expansions and its $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer, you may have notice that all things seem to point north (Canada, England.)

Especially the move to Waterfront Toronto: the datacenter is now completely running on SoftLayer, and is working so well that IBM is branching out into hybrid cloud.

And with hybrid cloud comes the biggest of the big - Big Data.

So, how does the company plan on tackling the Big Data of its 6,000 new clients (that's correct 6,000 new clients in one year since the acquisition of SoftLayer), including clients like Macy's, Whirlpool, Daimler subsidiary moovel Gmbh, Sicoss Group?

IBM is now offering more than 300 services within the IBM cloud marketplace that are based on SoftLayer, services likes, Watson Engagement Advisor on SoftLayer, Watson Developer Cloud on SoftLayer all designed for clients searching for the true large-scale, hybrid-cloud Big Data experience that only IBM and SoftLayer can offer the world right now.

According to Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services: ""'¦in its first year, SoftLayer has proven to be a pivotal acquisition for IBM Cloud, SoftLayer has quickly become the foundation of IBM's cloud portfolio anchoring our infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service offerings and transforming the fortunes of many industry companies from Web startups to established enterprises looking for the speed, flexibility and security that hybrid cloud environments provide. Of all the options for public or private clouds in the market, IBM Cloud with all of its resources, assets and expertise is the logical choice for a world where the volume and complexity of data-rich workloads grows exponentially every day. ""

The dark-horse in the datacenter and cloud race has pulled ahead and continues to grow at an amazing rate. But really is it any wonder? IBM was the first mainframe and the founder of the 1st platform, it should be the company's goal and responsibility to be the head of the 3rd platform - the rise of cloud computing."

Author

Mike Allen

"Almost exactly one year ago today, IBM acquired the cloud company (SoftLayer) and ever since has become one of the front-runners in the data center world. Keep in mind, IBM was the ""dark horse"" in the data center and cloud race - when other companies like Amazon and Facebook were ...